Lucinda Franks Quotes

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Dreams can be like charades in which we act out words rather than see or speak them.

I can't claim to 'understand' 'Byzantium,' if any dance work can be 'understood,' but whenever I see it, I sense that it's charged with meaning.

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

The drawing and the crafting of the story are fun, but it's the overall meaning that matters to me. It might escape some people who just want to read a comic, and that's fine. The overall meaning is what matters.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

I've always loved color because it's a little bit like music. I love that it seems to be both physical and ephemeral and engages us as a metaphor for our feeling lives.

A picture can say a thousand words but maybe not the correct ones.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Speech is like cloth of Arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thoughts they lie but as packs.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

You, of course, are a rose-- But were always a rose.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind , As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves.

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.